Beyond SpaceX: Why great IPOs depend on more than first-day demand

Good morning. The frenzy around trillion-dollar IPOs is back—and for many investors, so is the fear of missing the next Nvidia.

In a new Fortune feature article, my colleague Amanda Gerut examines what’s driving demand for blockbuster IPOs like SpaceX—and why investor psychology can matter just as much as company fundamentals. Financial advisor Jeff Barnett captures the tension: Even disciplined portfolios sometimes make room for a “lottery ticket” trade, if only to avoid missing what could become a generational wealth event.

Gerut writes: “SpaceX, Anthropic, and eventually OpenAI are the IPOs people are dreaming about, especially if they feel the ache of missing out on Nvidia: $10,000 in Nvidia a decade ago would be worth roughly $1.8 million today. When SpaceX went public, more than 500 million shares traded—marking the second-heaviest first-day IPO volume in Nasdaq history, behind only Facebook’s 580 million in 2012. But here’s the thing. If you missed day one, all is not lost. And in fact, history shows you may have better opportunities to buy in the future.”

For CFOs, an IPO isn’t just a liquidity event—it’s the ultimate test of an equity story. Finance chiefs spend months refining the narrative, sharpening the metrics, and testing the waters with institutional investors to gauge whether the investment case will hold up once the market opens. History suggests that the real measure of an IPO isn’t the first-day pop but the company’s ability to earn investor confidence over time. While some investors chase allocations in hot trillion-dollar IPOs, CFOs are focused on the other side of the table: building an equity story that can withstand scrutiny long after opening day.

To see the three rules investing professionals use to evaluate the market’s biggest IPOs—and why those lessons matter whether you’re allocating capital or raising it—read Gerut’s complete article here.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Jennifer Simon was appointed CFO of Upland Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: UPLD), a provider of enterprise intelligence, effective Aug. 17. Simon brings more than 20 years of finance leadership. She joins Upland from NextGen Healthcare, where she served as SVP of finance. Immediately prior, she spent more than three years at Quest Software, a private equity-backed global software company, rising from VP of finance to interim CFO. She also previously served as CFO of Community Impact Newspaper.

Jamie Schroeder was appointed CFO of Premium Guard Inc. (PGI), a filter manufacturer and supplier. Schroeder joins PGI with more than 30 years of executive finance and operational leadership experience. Most recently, Schroeder served in executive finance leadership roles in the retail space, including Big Lots. Prior to that, he spent more than 16 years at Scotts Miracle-Gro. He began his career at Ford Motor Company.

Big Deal

CFA Institute’s Research and Policy Center has launched a new research series to help the investment profession understand how AI-driven structural change will reshape capital markets and industry practice. The inaugural paper, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Finance: A Framework for Structural Change,” introduces an AI Transition Framework aimed at giving investment professionals and regulators a way to engage proactively with AI’s growing role in finance.

The research focuses on four structural forces—capability, adoption, substitution, and recomposition—and uses them to map how AI could alter competitive dynamics, professional norms, market structure, and systemic risk. The paper also underscores the importance of model oversight, explainability, accountability, and institutional resilience, introducing “cognitive convergence” to describe the growing alignment of models and data across institutions and its implications for market resilience.

Going deeper

“OpenAI says its AI models secretly broke out of a secure test environment and hacked into AI company Hugging Face in order to cheat on an evaluation" is a Fortune article by Jeremy Kahn and Emily Forlini.

The authors write: "OpenAI said Tuesday that two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access and then hacked their way into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on an internal evaluation test." Read more here.